Though the economy is improving, job placement rates for California law schools dipped in the latest figures.

Look through the slideshow to see California's 21 American Bar Association-approved law schools, ranked by the percentage of 2013 graduates holding full-time, long-term jobs that require a juris doctor degree.

The ABA now releases ample data on how many students participate in clinics, externiships and simulation courses. The National Jurist used this data to measure which law schools are delivering when it comes to practical training.

As we did last year, we looked at the percentage of full-time students in clinics, externships, and simulation courses. This year, we also looked at student participation in interscholastic skills competitions, such as moot court tournaments.

We again placed the most weight on clinical experience, at 30 percent. ... Externships -- at 25 percent -- were given second highest weight. ... Simulations accounted for 20 percent. ... School competitions were given a weight of 5 percent. We then asked schools to provide additional information about their additional offerings that are not reflected in these numbers, and this accounted for the final 20 percent. For example, schools requiring pro bono work were awarded points for those efforts.

Overall, law schools delivered more experiential opportunities per full-time student than in the prior year. Clinics grew from .22 clinic position per student to .23, a modest change, but significant for one year. Simulation courses grew from .92 per student to .95 per student. ...

[M]ore schools are earning top grades, as 86 schools received a B or higher.

U.S. law schools face renewed scrutiny over claims about their ability to find work for their graduates, a crucial selling point amid one of the legal industry’s worst-ever job markets.

Some of the schools have been creating temporary jobs for grads by paying nonprofits and others to employ them, a move that in some cases has boosted the schools’ standings in the much-followed U.S. News & World Report rankings.

A new rule adopted last week by the accrediting arm of the American Bar Association will tighten such claims, giving law schools less credit for jobs that they subsidize. ...

Critics say such jobs unjustifiably burnish the results reported by law school deans, who are under pressure to make their schools stand out as the financial value of a law degree increasingly has been questioned. ...

Under the new ABA rule, effective next year, all 204 schools accredited by the group will have to leave out jobs they subsidize when reporting how many graduates found long-term, full-time employment that requires a law license.

Here is the March Madness Law School Bracket, with outcomes determined by the 2016 U.S. News Law School Rankings (using academic peer reputation as a tiebreaker). The Final Four are Harvard (2 in U.S. News), Virginia (8), Duke (8), and Texas (15), with Harvard beating Virginia in the championship game. The closest match ups are:

The overall rankings at eight California law schools—USC, UC-Davis, UC-Hastings, Loyola, University of San Diego, Santa Clara, Pacific McGeorge and University of San Francisco—have fallen, in some cases plunged, in recent years. The rankings at four other programs—Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UCLA and Pepperdine—have remained relatively stable. (The remaining eight schools remain unranked.)

I have updated the Deans' data with the new 2016 U.S. News rankings. Of the 12 ranked California law schools, the ranking of eight (67%) increased from 2015; two (17%) decreased; and two (17% were unchanged. The same four law schools either increased their ranking over four years (Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and Pepperdine) or remained the same (UCLA).

I received a press release and executive summary of a forthcoming article in the Buffalo Law Review by Edward Adams (Minnesota) & Samuel Engel, Does Law School Still Make Economic Sense?: An Empirical Analysis of “Big” Law Firm Partnership Prospects and the Relationship to Law School Attended:

This study is the first to comprehensively examine the relationship between law school attended and achieving partnership in the 100 largest American law firms. Seeking to address issues related to a previous study by Ted Seto [Where do Partners Come From, 62 J. Legal Educ. 242 (2012)], the extensive empirical analysis included in this paper is a critical and seminal addition to the increasingly visible debate regarding the value of a legal education, law school rankings, and the factors that should be considered by potential law students when choosing a law school to attend. ...

Table 1 ranks the top 100 law schools, according to an index score based on the number of partners from each school and their weighted class size as further described below. The table also includes an indicator that states the difference between this ranking and the United States News and World Report ranking. Although the celebrated T-14 nearly stayed intact, significant differences are seen immediately outside that range. The index score is included to demonstrate the actual magnitude between different rankings, and the last four columns provide supplementary information helpful in properly analyzing the index score. ...

Much as I despise the USNWR ranking system, I’m a bit surprised that we deans (and associate deans) don’t use our relatively outsized influence as voters in the peer-assessment component of the ranking to police our own ranks.

Continuing a TaxProf Blog tradition (see links below for 2009-2015), here is the full list of the 198 law schools ranked by academic peer reputation, as well as their overall rank, in the new 2016 U.S. News Law School Rankings (methodology here):

This post reports the same data for all other law schools as to which NLJ’s website provides data, and reports it in two forms: (1) by percentage of the graduating class (“% Hired”), extending the NLJ’s own ranking, and (2) by absolute numbers of hires (“# Hired”) by the NLJ250.

The number of first-year law students has reached its lowest national level since 1973, according to an American Bar Association report. In the fall of 2014, only 37,924 first-year students entered the 204 ABA-approved law schools, a 4.4 percent decrease from 2013 and a 27.7 percent decrease from 2010’s all-time high.

Whereas the University Law School has also seen a decrease — with a current total enrollment of 1,005 students, down 88 students from an enrollment of 1,093 students in 2011 — Law School Dean Paul Mahoney attributes this decline not to national trends, but rather to an intentional effort to lower the student-faculty ratio to 10:1.

The new associate hiring picture at large law firms improved for the third straight year in 2014, but that growth wasn’t due to firms enlarging the size of the first-year associate classes. Instead, a smaller cohort of new law graduates meant that a higher percentage of them could land associate jobs at the largest 250 law firms in the country, even though those firms hired roughly the same number of new associates as in 2013.

We’ve ranked the top 50 law schools by percentage of 2014 juris doctors who took jobs at the largest 250 firms by lawyer head count—as identified in The National Law Journal’s annual survey of the nation’s 350 largest law firms. We also identified the schools that saw the most alumni promoted to partner, and highlighted the 20 schools that outperform their U.S. News & World Report ranking when it comes to large firm hiring. We take an even deeper dive into our annual law school report in our special interactive feature.

The Princeton Review has released a new book and online resource that addresses two of the major concerns of college applicants and their parents: paying for college and graduating with a good job and paycheck" ... [A] one-of-a-kind guide to the nation's academically best and most affordable colleges that also have excellent records of alumni employment. The Princeton Review ... developed a unique “Return-on-Education” (ROE) rating to winnow its list of colleges for this book. ROE measures 40 weighted data points. Everything from academics, cost, financial aid, and student debt to statistics on graduation rates, alumni salaries and job satisfaction.

Robert Morse (Director of Data Research, U.S. News & World Report) has announced that the new law school rankings will be released online on March 10 and in hard copy later in March. Here are the current 2015 law school rankings:

How do law firms fare in translating expected talent to actual success? Recently, we published the ATL Top Litigation Firms By Law School Pedigree ranking, a look, focusing on litigation practice, at how longstanding assumptions about attorney credentials are holding up in this new environment. ...

[H]ow does expected talent (as measured by law school credentials) correlate with other indicators of “success”? Below is a comparison — for amusement purposes only! — of the interplay between School Pedigree Rank and Am Law PPP Ranking. Keep in mind that this group only includes those firms in the intersection between “Top Litigation Firms” (as defined in our methodology) and the Am Law 100 (i.e., the boutiques are generally missing):

LSAT scores are designed, in part, to predict success on the bar exam. But 33 schools excel above and beyond what their LSAT scores predict. How are these schools bucking the odds? ...

[W]hich schools are adding the most value to their students when it comes to the bar exam? The National Jurist sought to answer this question by undertaking a statistical analysis of the nation's law schools, using linear regression. We compared incoming LSAT scores with bar passage rates. We looked at two classes -- the Class of 2011 and the Class of 2012. ... We also took into account the difference of state bar passage rates. The end result: more than 62 percent of law schools are within 5 percent of their expected score. But there are some that struggle and some that perform far better than expected.

The National Jurist ranked the Top 50 law schools whose students outperform on the bar exam. Here are the Top 25:

The University of Missouri at Kansas City gave the Princeton Review false information designed to inflate the rankings of its business school, which was under pressure from its major donor to keep the ratings up, according to an outside audit released Friday.

The audit -- by PricewaterhouseCoopers -- described the process by which business school officials came up with creative reasons to provide data that many at the school believed to be false, and that the audit found to be false. ...

But the audit also confirmed many of the findings of an August article in The Kansas City Star that found "a pattern of exaggerations and misstatements" by the business school. At the time, the university disputed the Star's report, but Missouri governor Jay Nixon requested an investigation, and that request led to the report issued Friday. ...

The improving economy contributed to a second strong year in a row for colleges’ endowment returns, according to an annual study released on Thursday. Colleges’ endowments returned an average of 15.5 percent in the 2014 fiscal year, up from 11.7 percent in 2013.

The ranking of 851 colleges is here. The Top 25 (figures in thousands):

Ohio's Miami University—Oxford took top honors as the most efficient school among National Universities and Michigan's Hope College was most efficient among National Liberal Arts Colleges in an exclusive U.S. News analysis that compared spending and educational quality.

For this analysis, U.S. News looked at the public and private colleges that scored the highest on overall undergraduate academic educational quality, as measured by their position in the 2015 Best Colleges rankings, but that spent relatively less on their educational programs to achieve that quality.

U.S. News measures financial resources by taking into account how much a school spends per student on instruction, research, student services and related educational expenditures. The financial resources indicator has a 10 percent weight in the Best Colleges ranking methodology.

The lists below are based on operating efficiency, which U.S. News has defined as a school's 2013 fiscal year financial resources per student divided by its overall score – the basis U.S. News uses to determine its overall numerical rank – in the 2015 Best Colleges rankings.

This calculation reveals how much each school is spending to achieve one point in its overall score and thus its position in the rankings. The premise of the analysis is that the less a school spent relative to its position in the overall rankings, the more efficient it was in its ability to produce a top-quality education.

Following recent discussions about the importance of blogging/tweeting to contemporary academia (see: LSE via TaxProf), and Bridget Crawford’s Law Prof Twitter Census (version 3.0) over at TheFacultyLounge, I thought I’d do some number crunching and network building.

I wrote a short script to read all of the law prof twitter handles included in the census and query the twitter API to get the follower lists and statistics for each user. This allowed me to both rank law prof twitterers (because we all know how much people like to rank things) and project them onto an interactive network so we can see how they relate to one another. ...

The law prof network (consisting of following relationships amongst law profs in the census) has 535 nodes and 16354 edges (directed density = 0.057). The entire network (including all of the followers of all of the law profs) is much larger. In total there are 741,385 unique twitter users who follow law profs.

The table below lists the top twenty profs by number of followers:

Handle

Name

School

Followers

lessig

Lawrence Lessig

Harvard

324,336

SportsLawGuy

Gabe Feldman

Tulane

33,728

zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain

Harvard

30,787

McCannSportsLaw

Michael McCann

New Hampshire

29,771

ZephyrTeachout

Zephyr Teachout

Fordham

25,328

CassSunstein

Cass Sunstein

Harvard

21,333

gregorymcneal

Greg McNeal

Pepperdine

17,440

scrawford

Susan Crawford

Cardozo

15,641

superwuster

Tim Wu

Columbia

11,804

JonathanTurley

Jonathan Turley

George Washington

11,715

bethnoveck

Beth Simone Noveck

NYLS

10,422

patentlyo

Dennis Crouch

Missouri

9,889

PrivacyLaw

Michael Scott

Southwestern

9,024

garylfrancione

Gary Francione

Rutgers-Newark

8,844

adamwinkler

Adam Winkler

UCLA

8,706

Limiting our rankings to those professors who have the most followers amongst other law professors on twitter, changes the results quite a bit:

To determine the most diverse law schools, we broke down each school into six categories -- percentage of minority faculty; percentage of black students; percentage of Asian and Hawaiian students; percentage of Hispanic students; percentage of American Indian students; and percentage of Caucasian students.

We assigned each school a score from one to 10 for all categories, except for American Indians. We assigned each school a score from one to five for that category, given the much smaller number of students.

A school that matched the U.S. national average for any race received a seven (or 3.5 for American Indian), and a school that was 30 percent or greater than the national average received a 10 (or 5 for American Indian). We then weighted the student categories as 75 percent of the final diversity score and faculty at 25 percent.

preLaw ranked the Top 70 law schools for diversity. 28 law schools received an A+ grade, led by:

There is no shortage of lawyers on Capitol Hill — they comprise 45 percent of the 114th Congress [Of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 160 are occupied by lawyers. Of the 100 senators, 54 have law degrees.]. But unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, whose nine justices hail from just three elite law schools, a state school law degree won't hamper and may even smooth the way to the U.S. House of Representatives or Senate.

The sitting crop of lawyer-­lawmakers passed through 105 law campuses on their way to Washington. The 20 law schools that sent the most alumni to Congress include some of the country's most prominent. ... But there are plenty of surprises outside the top five.

We used to think of people devoted to blogging as doing so sitting in their par­ents' basement, wearing a bath­ robe, unshaven, with empty Miller bottles next to them.

That is not Paul Caron, who is in the Intellectual category. He runs both the TaxProf Blog and The Law Professor Blog Network, where one can find just about everything hot and current about law at your fingertips. A column from The New York Times on a falling law school? He's got a link to it. An article on the downsizing of law schools and what it means? He links to it. A paper on the correlation and con­cordance between the CR.4 Index and the Herfindahl-Hirscham Index? Yep, you can find that there as well.

Caron, one of the leading tax scholars in the nation, makes the list for the first time thanks in part to the power of blog­ging, which has become a hot mechanism for debate and information sharing in the legal community. The Law Professor Blogs Network, which Caron owns, sponsors more than 40 blogs in an assortment of legal areas. More than 100 deans, professors and lawyers contribute.

Law school enrollment fell for the fourth straight year in 2014, according to figures released earlier this month by the ABA. Nationwide, the number of first-year students who showed up on law campuses this fall declined by 4.4 percent compared with the previous year, which amounts to 1,751 fewer students. That means new student enrollment is down by nearly 28 percent across the country since its historic peak in 2010, when many flocked to law school during the economic recession.

Taken as a group, New York's 15 law schools mirrored the national trend. ... According to ABA, the number of first-year enrollees in all New York law schools fell 4.7 percent to 3,772 from 3,962. New York enrollment has fallen approximately [21 percent since 2011].

The following chart lists each New York law school's U.S. News ranking and 1L enrollment for the classes entering in 2011, 2013, and 2014:

This is the second annual report on JDs in senior business positions in U.S. publicly traded companies. In the inaugural version published last year, I compiled a ranking of the top-25 law schools by the number of JDs serving in director and executive officer positions in publicly traded companies.

The Top 14 law schools in Rob's measure are the same as the U.S. News Top 14, led by Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia. The biggest outliers are the inclusion of West Virginia (19 in JDs in the Boardroom, 101 in U.S. News), Penn State (20, 76), Utah (23, 47), and UC-Hastings (21, 44).

I assembled data on the top 50 law schools and their rankings from U.S. News, beginning in 1994 (the first year in which U.S. News ranked 50 schools) and continuing through 2014, and began with a question: Over those 21 years, how many schools have been represented among the “Top N,” where N ∈ {1,2,3,…50}. So for example, there has been one “Top 1″ school (Yale) during that entire 21-year period; there have been three “Top 2″ schools (schools that have been ranked either #1 or #2 at any point): Yale, Harvard, and Stanford; there have been four “Top 3″ schools (the three listed above, plus the University of Chicago), and so forth. ...

[There is] a pattern longtime observers of the U.S. News rankings are probably familiar with: Little year-to-year variation at the very top of the rankings; somewhat more variability within the Top 14 / Top 17, but little or no movement into or out of those groups; and substantial annual variability in the 20-50 range, especially among schools ranked 20-35. ...

If we plot each “Top 50″ school’s annual ranking over time, we get the “spaghetti plot” [right]. With a few exceptions (like Yale at the top) it is impossible to track any particular school’s changes over time. What the plot does show, however, is the degree of variability in the rankings, both at different levels and across time. For example, one can clearly see the variation in the schools ranked 8-14, and the high variability in the 20-40 range. There was also significantly more of the latter early in the rankings (especially 1994-1996) than we observe more recently.

[T]his year’s National Survey of Student Engagement [Nessie], which was released on Thursday, ... took a stab at identifying educational quality on the institutional level, an attribute that is as important to higher education as it is hard to define. The survey collected data from 355,000 freshmen and seniors at 622 institutions in the spring.

Nessie researchers, who are based at Indiana University at Bloomington, created two indicators for quality. One, student-faculty interaction, asked students how often they talked with faculty members about career plans, course topics, or other ideas outside class, among other questions. The other measure, effective teaching practices, distilled student perceptions of how often their instructors clearly explained course goals and requirements, taught in an organized way, used examples to illustrate difficult points, or provided feedback.

The results were surprising, especially when they were grouped based on how selective a college is. ... [R]esearchers analyzed the measures of interaction and teaching according to selectivity, as defined by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges.

The average student, the researchers found, experienced widely different degrees of educational quality in different colleges within the same category of prestige. And, in all but a few cases, the categories of selectivity had no meaningful relationship to the indicators of teaching and interaction. ...

"Conventional wisdom says that the more selective an institution is, the better it is going to be," Alexander C. McCormick, director of Nessie, said in an interview. "That’s not systematically true with these two measures." ...

Dave Hoffman (Temple) blogs lawsuits by William Hanrahan, a Drexel 3L with Asperger's Syndrome ranked #4 in his class, claiming that three big Philadelphia law firms (Blank Rome, Dechert, Pepper Hamilton) discriminate against disabled job applicants by unduly relying on the U.S. News ranking of the applicant's law school:

I’m not an expert in this area of the law, but I thought the complaint provided an interesting set of facts for discussion. My uninformed view is that the chain of causation (disability –> lower LSAT –> lower-ranked school –> fewer job offers) isn’t incredible, but that it’s hard to imagine a judge forcing firms to discount rankings (which, after all, aren’t entirely or even mostly based on student credentials) when making hiring decisions.

Paying more money in tuition for law school does not necessarily boost your chance of passing the bar on the first try, but it doesn't seem to hurt either, according to a chart by FindTheBest. [Click on bubbles to see results for individual law schools.]

I received in the mail my ballot for the 2016 U.S. News Tax Rankings (2015 U.S. News tax rankings). As in prior years, the survey is intended "to identify the law schools having the top programs in tax law." The survey is sent "to a selection of faculty members involved in and who are knowledgeable about the area of tax law. Law schools supplied names of these faculty members to U.S. News in summer 2014." Recipients are asked "to [i]dentify up to fifteen (15) schools that have the highest-quality tax law courses or programs. In making your choices consider all elements that contribute to a program's excellence, for example, the depth and breadth of the program, faculty research and publication record, etc."

As Donald Tobin (Dean, Maryland) has noted, it is more than strange that NYU has finished ahead of Florida and Georgetown each year that U.S. News has conducted the survey. Because the survey ranks the schools by how often they appear on the respondents' "Top 15" lists, this means that some folks list NYU, but not Florida and Georgetown, among the Top 15 tax programs.

At $201,000 a year, Harvard Law School alumni earn more than those of any other U.S. graduate school by the midpoint in their careers. ...

The data come courtesy of the online salary-information company PayScale [press release], which has asked 1.4 million people what they earn in return for finding out how they stack up against their peers. ... The survey pulled data for more than 600 graduate schools, including only those for which there were enough respondents to make their answers statistically valid. ...

Among their findings: the midcareer median salary for seven of the top 10 graduate programs were law schools, but business schools produced eight out of the top 10 highest salaries for those less than five years past graduation. Eight of the top 17 programs that produced graduates with the highest midcareer salary were in California, many in and around Silicon Valley.

Unlike the popular periodicals, we did not arbitrarily assign a percentage weight to the five variables in the SMI formula and add those values together to obtain a score. The relative weight of any variable was established by testing how much a realistic change in the value of that variable would move a school within a set of rankings derived from real data. Accordingly, the greatest sensitivity for movement in the SMI rankings comes from making changes in tuition or making changes in the percentage of students within the student body whose family incomes are less than or equal to the national median--$48,000. Simply put, a school can most dramatically move itself upwards in the SMI rankings by lowering its tuition or increasing its percentage of economically disadvantaged students (or both).

While tuition and economic background of the student body are the most sensitive variables in the SMI, three other variables in descending order of sensitivity are also critical. These are: graduation rate, early career salary, and endowment. While capable of producing big movements, graduation rate and early career salary carry approximately ½ the sensitivity of the first two variables. The rationale for this is not only that tuition and economic background are the most critical front end determinants for access, they are also the two variables over which policy makers have almost 100 percent, decisive control. By contrast, improving early career salary or graduation rate—critical outcomes to economic mobility-- require more substantial policy and system changes over a longer term. Finally, endowment carries ½ the sensitivity of the outcome variables. Although a strong indicator of power to act, endowment primarily serves a “tie-breaking” role in the SMI as explained below.

The relative sensitivity of the variables in the 2014 SMI are as follows:

Variable

Sensitivity

Tuition

126

Economic Background

125

Graduation Rate

66

Early Career Salary

65

Endowment

30

Here are the Top 10 and the bottom 10 coleges in the social mobility rankings:

Princeton, Harvard and Yale, which are 1, 2, and 3 in the U.S. News college rankings, are 360, 438, and 440 in the social mobility rankings. (Hat Tip: Maureen Weston.)

PreLaw magazine did an exhaustive review of the nation's 200-plus law schools to identify the very best facilities. We started by looking at numerous sources, including our own staff visits and The Princeton Review's 2014 edition of The Best 169 Law Schools to narrow the pool down to the top 60 based primarily on student satisfaction. ...

[A]esthetics and student feedback accounted for 35% of our score, library hours and seating for 27.5%, amenities [dining, fitness center, lockers, study carrels] for 20%, and square footage per student for 17.5%. ... In the end, even though we had initially set out to identify the 50 best buildings, we felt compelled to honor 55.

For American legal scholarship to fulfill its purpose, it must have an impact on the development of the actual law as it is enacted and interpreted in the United States. However, legal scholarship broadly — and law review articles in particular — has become less influential on judges and members of the practicing bar over time. This short essay argues that the decline is partly attributable to the open reliance on metrics that primarily represent influence within the legal academy when measuring the value of a scholar’s work. In particular, I argue that a focus on metrics with only a tenuous connection to non-academic usage of a new scholar’s work, such as download counts, law journal citation count-based rankings methodologies, and article placement, incentivizes new legal writers to write for other academics rather than for judges, attorneys in practice, or policy-makers.

U.S. News and World Reporthas announced that it will release its first global ranking of universities on Oct. 28. U.S. News plans to publish a global ranking of the top 500 universities across 49 countries, as well as four regional, 11 country-level, and 21 subject area-specific rankings.

The Best Global Universities ranking will be based on reputational data, bibliometric indicators of academic research performance, and data on faculty and Ph.D. graduates. Robert Morse, U.S. News’s chief data strategist, said that there will be no cross-over of data between the publication's longstanding ranking of American colleges and the new global ranking, which will rely on data from Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters also provides data for the global university ranking compiled by Times Higher Education (THE).

“What we’re doing is completely, 100 percent independent from THE,” Morse said. “It’s our methodology, our choice of variables, our choice of weights, our choice of how the calculations are done, our choice of how the data’s going to be presented.”

Best Quality of Life: Based on student assessment of: whether there is a strong sense of community at the school, how aesthetically pleasing the law school is, the location of the law school, the quality of the social life, classroom facilities, and the library staff.

Virginia

Duke

Chapman

St. Thomas (Minnesota)

Northwestern

Best Classroom Experience: Based on student answers to survey questions concerning their professors' teaching abilities, the balance of theory and practical skills in the curricula, the level of tolerance for differing opinions in class discussion, and their assessments of classroom facilities.

Stanford

Duke

Virginia

Chicago

Northwestern

Best Career Prospects: Based on school reported data and student surveys. School data include: the average starting salaries of graduating students, the percent of students immediately employed upon graduation and the percent of these students who pass the bar exam the first time they take it. Student answers to survey questions on: how much the law program encourages practical experience; the opportunities for externships, internships and clerkships, and how prepared the students feel they will be to practice the law after graduating.

University of Virginia School of Law applicants are likely attracted by the school’s ranking — eighth, according to U.S. News and World Report. It also has the highest employment rate in the nation, 95.6 percent, within nine months of graduation.

But about 16 percent of those graduates hold jobs funded by the university.

Only about 62.2 percent of 2013 law school graduates nationwide reported having a full-time job within nine months of graduation that required passing the bar exam.

Many schools have fellowship programs to assist graduates who are unable to find long-term employment — and students who accept these university-funded jobs are considered to be employed full time when the school reports employment data nine months after graduation.

Among the top 10 schools ranked by U.S. News and World Report, six schools fund jobs for at least 5 percent of graduates nine months after graduation.

UNC School of Law doesn’t have a fellowship program, and its employment rate is about 69 percent, ranking 33rd nationally.

“It does hurt us in the rankings,” said Brian Lewis, assistant dean for career development at UNC School of Law. “Our employment numbers aren’t as good as other schools that are counting people that they’re paying as employed. But we’ve tried to be as transparent as possible.” ...

UVa. Law School Dean Paul Mahoney said while the school does employ a number of graduates in university-funded jobs, most are participating in a yearlong fellowship program for graduates, who work in the nonprofit or government sector. “They are not working here at the law school,” he said.

In contrast, Duke University has an employment rate of 85.9 percent, with less than 1 percent of students working in jobs funded by the school. ...

Students who perform well after the first year of law school are increasingly transferring to schools ranked higher by U.S. News to maximize their chances of getting a law firm job immediately following graduation. This phenomena raises two fundamental and understudied issues: how students make the decision to seek to transfer to a higher-ranked and higher-tier law school, and why such law schools are willing to admit transfer students into their second-year class who they were not willing to admit initially. The first issue we explore through interviews with students who transferred as well as those who could have transferred but chose not to. The second issue we explore by highlighting the persuasiveness of U.S. News as a determinant of law school status and the ways in which the magazine has spawned the growth and development of law school competition for transfer students. We conclude that the scale and magnitude of the phenomenon of transfer students is affecting significantly the practices and procedures of all law schools, and that this phenomenon is driven by U.S. News’s failure to account for the LSAT scores and UGPAs of students that both transfer into and out of law schools when determining rankings. We conclude with a modest proposal that the ABA and U.S. News should require law schools to provide the metrics of incoming transfer students and exclude the metrics of departed transfer students.

While the nationwide employment rate for recent graduates has been largely flat during the past few years, some schools have bucked the trend and significantly improved their employment rates. Nineteen law schools improved their employment rate by 10% or more during the past two years, according to a formula created by The National Jurist ... using data from the ABA. ... The National Jurist calculates its employment rate using a formula that tracks full-time bar passage required employment at 100%, full-time-JD preferred employment at 70%, and ten other categories at percents from 60% to as low as 10% for non-professional, full-time positions.